Friday, January 10, 2014


Free Republic directs me to this:
San Francisco Liberals Outlaw Storing Items in Your Own Garage

How far will the government go to infringe on your rights?

In San Francisco, residents aren't even allowed to store their own belongings in their home.

Residents of the liberal city are banned from using their garage to store any personal property other than a vehicle. Chapter Six of the San Francisco Housing Code states, "Private and public storage garages in apartment houses and hotels shall be used only for storage of automobiles." Those who violate the law can be slapped with a $500 fine.


What ever happened to property rights?

Could this happen in your area?
This is spreading in the wingnuttosphere -- at the Daily Paul; at the site of the Institute for Justice, a Koch-funded, ALEC-affiliated libertarian group; here and here and here and here ... and probably in an email forward from your Fox-obsessed uncle any day now.

So what's really going on? Let's turn to the San Francisco Chronicle:
Kimberly Conley and Amandeep Jawa don't have a car, so they use their Mission District garage to store their bicycles - in direct violation of San Francisco law.

The couple, along with probably thousands of other San Franciscans, are scofflaws because of a little-known section of code that bars people from using garages to store anything but automobiles. The law went unnoticed until three months ago, when San Francisco attorney Gary Rabkin commented on its ridiculousness on a website dedicated to presenting city laws to the public in an easy-to-navigate format.

On Tuesday, Supervisor Mark Farrell will propose a measure to scrap the garage code....
Emphasis added because, um, maybe this law is ridiculous, but if it "went unnoticed until three months ago," that means it's not actually being enforced. So evil liberals are restricting your God-given freedoms in theory, but not actually in practice.

Which is a strange sort of fascism.

What's more, there's a move afoot to repeal the law. Which is also something that doesn't usually happen to effective tools of fascism in a fascist state.

And in case you missed it above, look at the law in question and notice the wording:
So this doesn't even apply to single-family homes -- just to hotels and apartment buildings.

The righties are raving about "what happens when liberalism runs amok." and "Government involvement in every facet of life" and "micromanagement of a community." -- Funny thing, though -- clearly the liberal fascists forgot to do the micromanaging.


Never Ben Better said...

Ah, but all the screamers need is a hook, however small and rusty, on which to hang their UTTER OUTRAGE at yet another liberal assault on Real Americans. Details, schmetails; validity is irrelevant.

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of all those stupid sodomy, beat your wife on the court steps, ride your horse through the town, laws that are still on the books but nobody bothers to enforce.

Here is how they should attack liberal cities.

Liberal cities are where the 1%, who are social liberals, lives. It's where the partying, drug doing, sleeping around bankers and hedge fund managers live. It's where the income inequality is greatest. It's where the tech companies who spy on us live. If you look at every fucked up thing with this country now, and who's screwing who... the evil guys are social liberals in the major cities.

That's how you go after evil liberals in cities. It will also help them split Democrats because you can't be the party of SanFran, NYC, DC, and LA and not be a party of rich plutocrats and bankers. And guess what, those same bankers share our liberal values on god, guns, and gays. Hell, show how the Human Rights Campaign is in bed with Goldman Sachs and cheering them on!

That's what the right should be doing, but they are too stupid to point all this out.

Anonymous said...

The whole thing is sadder than that. I spent 10 years administering zoning and building codes and the intent of this law jumps right out: conditions of getting a permit for a commercial building including apartments always include a minimum number of parking spots depending on the use and capacity of the building. On the other hand the return on a square footage basis for such parking spots is generally negative. So what you want is some law that prevents some developer from labeling a big warehouse space as 'parking' and then converting it to that other use. And so displacing the actual need for parking to support the building/enterprise out onto the neighborhood.

BTW this works on the flipside too. Building and fire codes require different construction standards depending on 'use', say between 'commercial garage' and 'commercial storage'. Developers will so try to pass off what are obviously going to be spaces for storing gas powered vehicles as 'storage' and so trigger building permit conditions that work in the opposite direction to this law, that is "no storage of vehicles to be allowed in this space".

Zoning and building codes from the outside seem ridiculously detailed. But that is largely because developers and builders profit margins depending on extracting the highest and best use of their square footage while minimizing set asides (like fire escapes and exits). And much of this conflict gets worked out at the permitting stage and so never triggers subsequent enforcement action.

Victor said...

Another tempest in the tea-potty.

Ten Bears said...

What's wrong with riding my horse in town?

We have bit of that problem here, where you can't even hang your clothes to dry in the garage. Has more to do with the credit-card rich cock-suckers in their hundred dollar jeans, thousand dollar boots and "cowboy" hats driving jacked-up de-engineered suburban assault vehicles with the hood ornament the perfect rendition of the human female reproductive system who have never done a day's work in their life than anything practical. It's the Retards that put this shit in place... so much for the "gooberment out of our lives" horse shit.

Facism is when the means of production, the corporation, control the means of distribution, the state. Nothing "liberal" about it, purely a reich-wing trait.

I think we ought to just kill them all, let their common dog, the Jew dog, sort them out.

Fear me.

John Kahler said...

Um, because the enforcement would be by, you know, the building owner/manager. This is dumber than dumb. We're talking about garage structures, not those little buildings or special rooms with a big door designed for cars. Like a poster above notes, parking spaces are part of the permit process. And the owner will put a provision in the lease that would say nothing but vehicles in the garage because they don't want folks using a garage for storage. Apartment buildings often have storage lockers for ... Storage. And who in an apartment building or hotel needs to have a lawn mower?

Public or private, by the way, is in the law because some apartment and hotel garages are only for patrons while others also are open to public parking. Have these dummies ever been in an actual city with garages other than those attached to single family dwellings?

Not only is this beyond stupid, any pol who says it needs to be changed is just as stupid. Though maybe an illustrated version with pictures of parking garages might help the information challenged see a garage is more than a little house/room for a car. Duh.

Examinator said...

Bruce makes a good point.
I too have seen some of the BS machinations developers go through to maximise their buck at the cost of every one else.
here there was a law The developers lobbied for and got that determines how much they have to pay Councils for services like sewerage/ electric light/ roads and curbing which was based on the number of bedrooms.They argued less bedrooms = less residents=less infrastructure. It was amusing to see houses with two bedrooms (minimum fee), two offices and or extra 'entertainment rooms'. Oh yes was the price of the house reduced? Pigs! the price went up! "it still costs to build these extra rooms( who would have thunk it!"
Oh yes the new owners changed the room usages too!
Thus putting the extra infrastructure costs on the other house owners

Try telling a fire fighter who is trying to save a building and lives or a victim that some lamebrain tenant in the building has a God given right to store incendiaries ( fireworks, solvents, ammunition etc) in his car spot? Don't laugh ! it actually happened and because of this 6 people 3 children and an old couple and a fireman died as a consequence.
I've Seen some basement storeage areas that are chock a block with fire fuel. and the owner smoked in there.
Sadly laws are there for the terminally stupid ( lowest common denominator.) people are so self obsessed they ignore issues that are dangerous.
Oh yes rooms like this and people who store valuable collections etc are one of the key reasons your home insurance costs so much.

Philo Vaihinger said...

Dear BW and Examinator, I had imagined the law must be about something like that, but the stupid audience for anti-government, don't tread on me tripe can be counted on to deride every effort of the law that stands between them and others who would profit by abuse of their ignorance.

Anonymous said...

One final note.

There is probably no liberal jackbooted zoning department in the country that would DARE impose the same kind of use restrictions you get in your standard Homeowners Associations Agreements and Covenants in your typical upper middle class Gated Community. In many of these you can get fined for non-standard landscaping and simply prohibited from parking a boat or RV in your DRIVEWAY, to say nothing of your front yard.

There are cities in the Sunbelt which historically had no zoning rules at all, developers could build rendering plants upwind of a residential neighborhood or WHATEVER. And most of these cities were equally marked by Gated Communities for the Rich. All with rules that would make your power hungry bureaucrat in NYC or SF drool with envy.

In my permitting days I used to bring this up with developers who were rapid property rights guys in Western Washington but meekly spent their winters under the totalitarian control of their Arizona golf course neighborhood HOA. As often as not headed up by some two or three retirees with too much time on their hands.

"Zoning for me but not for thee"

Roger said...

I would suspect the intent of the law was that hotel and apartment building garages shouldn't be used for general storage because those spaces are used by numerous persons who might have conflicting claims.

An apartment building which allowed people to store their crap anywhere in a common area dedictated to parking automobiles would be a nightmare.

There are a lot of practical reasons for such a law, even if the law isn't clearly articulated.